Acoustic ranging may entail detecting proximity and/or distance between a first device and a one or more other devices using at least one acoustic signal. Existing approaches usually involve using specialized hardware, especially hardware that includes an extensive fixed infrastructure. Existing techniques usually involve a reliance on local clock times at individual devices. Thus, existing approaches do not enable spontaneous acoustic ranging in ad hoc environments or with general commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. Furthermore, the use of local clock times in existing techniques introduces temporal uncertainties that lead to large ranging errors.